Book Review of Daughter of the Sea by Elisabeth J. Hobbes

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A romantic fantasy set in a recognisable Yorkshire landscape.

In the early nineteen-nineties, a famous commissioning editor proclaimed that his reading of the future fiction market was for “Erotica in a horror/fantasy landscape.” Thirty years on, this novel turns his specification upside-down.

The author allows herself only one fantastical premise (and this is a very traditional one) in that some individuals can be two different species and change forms at will, or according to their need. Pretty much everything else is solid and decently-researched eighteen-nineties Yorkshire. The landscape of this novel is born of observation and not fantasy. The local industry is correct (there was an episode of “Landscape Mysteries” by the Open University about this!) and we even see how pawnbrokers of the time manipulated prices to avoid the legal requirement to auction high-value unredeemed goods.

There are a couple of erotic scenes amidst all the Victorian morals, but while these are fantastical, they are not perverse.

The characters, regardless of species-shifting, are believable and the heroine’s heart versus head dilemma is complicated by the fact that her heart goes a bit in both directions, as does her head. There’s also a clear divide between being thoughtless or limited in scope and actual cruelty: both occur in the story but the author does not confuse the two.

The stories within this story question whether happy endings are real, but the real question is what is the heroine prepared to do for her happy ending and how does she even define “happy?”

Daughter of the Sea by Elisabeth J. Hobbes is published by Harper Collins “One More Chapter” on the 20^th of December 2021.